Friday, May 30, 2014

Update of "Chemistry Nobel rich in structure," since 2007

Thinking about the excitement surrounding last year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry, I thought it might be fun to update my '07 analysis of chem Nobels [Chemistry Nobel rich in structure.Science 315: 40].

In particular, from 1983 to 2013, 31 Nobel prizes in chemistry have been awarded to 67 scientists. (See classification gsheet and xls.) According to my count, 12 (~39%) have been in a "structure-related" field [struct]. Out of these 12, 6 were awarded for bio-crystallography related work [biocryst], 2 prizes for NMR, 2 for theoretical/computational contributions, 1 for fullerenes (essentially organic chemistry) and another for quasi-crystals.

The earlier analysis of the average Noble prize awards in the field of crystallography for the 1970-2006 period saw that this field captured 1 in 5 of the total chemistry awards. Over the last 30 years, the same distribution of awards can be observed (see Table 1 below). However the last decade saw a steep increase in the number of Nobel prizes awarded for crystallography. From year 2007 to 2013, 4 out of 7 Nobel prizes in chemistry were awarded in structure-related work.

At the publication level, there is a minor increase in the number of papers naming crystallography as their main subject (1.5 fold increase) or having crystallography as a search term (1.9 fold
increase) for 1983-2013 compared to 1970-2006. Looking just at the last 7 years, we see that only 3% of all chemistry publications deal with crystallography (5455 out of 179096), this resulted in a substantial 19-fold "Nobel enrichment" for crystallography. Comparing the publication density in various chemistry fields, we can see that the large enrichment in crystallography related Nobel awards is not matched by the density in corresponding publications (see Table 2).